echodrift

New year, new looks

This may not be 100% finished yet but I’m calling it quits for now. One can only take so much of staring at code and cursing WordPress. Really, why do you have to install a plugin in order to use PHP inside the content of a page? I usually just create a template for a specific page when I want to do that but this time I didn’t want to bother.

Also regarding WordPress and PHP, I cannot for the life of me figure out why it does not like my contact form the way I have it set up. It was all going swimmingly until the information actually validated. After that I just kept getting a “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.” I’ve been looking at that for hours and I’m still not sure what’s going on.

I also cannot figure out why the time isn’t displaying properly on my tweets. It works perfectly on my local copy but for some reason is 6 hours off on the actual site. I really don’t think that has anything to do with the fact that I was testing on WordPress 2.7 but who knows. Reason for that was so that I could find out if this theme would break when I upgrade. I’ll probably be saving that for tomorrow.

Continue reading…

Captured

A while back I decided that I had failed my 365 photography project. It got to the point where I felt like I was taking pictures just to be taking pictures. I also did not like the guilty feeling I got whenever I didn’t have something to upload. However, I still liked taking photos and posting them online so I decided to create a new photo blog.

Thus, Captured was born. I actually started work on Captured when I made the server move. Due to a couple of complications with the move (and some laziness on my part) I didn’t get everything wrapped up until now.

There are a few differences between this and the old photo blog. As I’ve already mentioned, I have no rules for myself about how often I post. I do plan to keep it updated regularly but no more scrambling to find a picture to post, no more thinking that I’ve failed. Someday, maybe, I’ll be able to have a successful 365 project.

Another difference between this photo blog and 365 is that I’m using this Yet Another Photo Blog plug in. With that and a few custom WordPress fields I’ve been able to improve the setup of the site as well as make it easier to expand the site later on.

Finally, it’s hosted at a different domain. I have a couple of reasons for this but I’m not going to go into them right now. I do plan to do more with that domain than what is there at present. It’s a project on my seemingly never ending to-do list.

Things I have learned

What I’ve learned while working on this new design:

• Margin collapsing is irritating and useful at the same time. Thanks to Becky pointing that site out to me I figured out what I needed to do to fix the part that was irritating me.
• Overflow fixes an issue that I’ve been having much more cleanly than my workaround.
• IE is still the devil. It is way too forgiving of mistakes. It also does things the wrong way, but in a way that makes me think it’s right. I’ve learned, though, that IE is never right.
• It is apparently not acceptable to use <p /> inside a blockquote. One must instead wrap the contents of a blockquote in <p>these tags</p> or the site won’t validate as xhtml strict.
• I hate styling comments most of all.

However, it’s finally done! Things were probably looking rather wonky before as I tried to fix some errors in my template files. All should be well, now. With this theme I was able to incorporate some things I had left out of the first, such as the link to my RSS feed. That as well as a few other things are located in the sidebar under Misc. I couldn’t come up with a better name for that section because it really is miscellaneous. Those icons are from a set that can be found at Vikiworks. Additionally, I found myself using Twitter more than I thought I would and wanted to include more tweets. My previous footer design didn’t work so well with showing more than one tweet so reason #5 to have a sidebar. (Yes, I did just make that number up.)

I still have some tweaks to do but for now I’m calling it quits. Time to do something other than stare at CSS and XHTML and pull my hair in frustration because the validator doesn’t like my placement of <p/> tags!

(As noted on the domain page I am aware that the footer doesn’t show up in Firefox 2. It’s weird and I’m not sure why.)

Three Sixty Five v. 2

Since I’m rather fickle when it comes to keeping site designs the same I redid 365. There were a few things that really bothered me about the last design. Guess it was because I was rather rusty when I made it. I had also planned to put up a new design for Once but the coding doesn’t want to cooperate like I want it too. I really want to be able to make it look like I want it so it might be a day or two. Or I may give in and make it a bit simpler. We’ll see.

I have a couple other projects in mind as well but they’re still in the planning stages. But that’s the fun part, you see: always having something to work on.